people box for many reasons includign the ones lsited above. i do it not at the exclusion of groupingwith other players, but i can stil ldo waht i want by myself too. i dont ever play alts on the same acct as antoher toon i ahve established, if i make antoher toon on same account i have to be willing to let the established toon fall by the wayside and thats jstu not me. if i want to (and have) play a ranger, im not going ot quit playing my sk to make a ranger etc. im goingo t make a ranger on antoher account so that i can play it without forcing my sk to sit in the wings, and thats exaclty what ive done. other times you make a box because it's nearly impossible to find that specific archetype, with a competent player behind it, WHEN you need one. Same reason mercs were created. A group of players cant jstu go do wahtever they want because they ahve a group, there are specific roles in that group that need to be filled and if your group of players no matter how good they are cant fill all those roles you're still stuck. if i have 6 rogues and want to go do the chelsith mission, not happening. if i have 3-4 rogues, it can happen due to merc healer/tank, or if 2 of those rogues box a healer or tank so that together the group still fills the archetype. i play with a lot of people that ask: what do you need? when invited to a group. they box. group says heler..they take their cleric and leave their war behind, they say tank they take the war and leave the cleric behind. what's wrong with that? this is like saying a mom n pop store that cant afford to pay more than 1 employee to work for them, shouldnt let their kids help out because other mom n pops might not have kids or theyre not old enough to help. jsut because 1 person only ahs 1 tool to utilize in a given ..thing. shuldnt mean that others that have other tools shoudlnt be allowed to use them, they did afterall put forht the effort to acquire those tools did they not? if 2 100 sk's go to duel and 1 has every clickie known to man and the other was pld up and only has theset of baz gear he bought with no augs or clickies farmed and no epic...should the one that did his homework have to unequip all his augs, not use any of his clickies etc, to make it "fair" to the least common denominator? no. thats not to say that there shoudltnbe content available for that least common denominator, just that the one that did what he had to to gain certain tools for his use, should be able to use those tools to do more content, or hte same content faster/easier etc. the whole anti-boxing campaign has always irritated me. its like the thug at a school that beats up the new kid because that kid has expensive shoes and the thug doesnt bc he blows all his dough on drugs and the new kid had an afterschool job to get the extra cash to buy his shoes. if you dont want to put forth the work DONTCOMPLAIN. jsut like the arguments about the shawl aug, if yo udont want to do tradeskills dontcomplain you dont have the aug. see if soemone else has soemthing i like and want ot have i dont get mad at them for having it, i go do waht i need to do to get my own.
The term "clique" is over-used. Guilds are teams. Groups are teams. Fellowships are teams. You do things with your teammates. You do things with your friends. That does not make you a clique. It makes you a team, working together for common goals. It does not automatically brand you as a clique. It does not automatically make you exclusive. Many people who are parts of teams are very helpful to the community at large. They help people outside their team in group content. They help people outside their team in missions. They help people outside their team with open raids. It's a misconception that all people with regular groups and guilds are aloof and only help themselves. In the vast majority of cases, that's simply not the case, in my experience.
In EQ we aren't expected (example) to have an advantage where we can kill 100x faster than others. Nor in principle should we be able to Pay For Advantage. Give me a tremendous advantage over others and I swear that I'll help out the less fortunate, honest I will 8P Removing the advantages of boxing by addressing the disadvantages of single account ownership is eminently fair. Only an advantage buying, vindictive, and unable to compete on a level playing field individuals would oppose it. (Even under single account disadvantage I'm the member of a team - my guild. I endlessly farmed the SL, EW, and Kael collectables solo and gave the stuff away to guildmates for months.) You are either a contributor or a taker rationalizing that you are taking care of you and yours while happily gearing up alts in raids/improving your box team thanks to the efforts made by us. (In fairness at least a dozen guildmates understand the disadvantages of single account ownership and help me stay current in the game. Their "Guild Jackets" don't come off when the raid disbands either.) Unfortunately SOE needs the money. and absent Paying for Power (and getting it) their revenue would decrease. So much for game integrity.
They already did: mercs. Everybody effectively has 2 characters from the same account active simultaneously. Sure, mercs are not as good as real chars. But they cut that 'single account ownership disadvantage' tremendously. Also, nice way of juggling words: single account ownership disadvantage. The real thing is called 'multiple account ownership advantage' and doesn't sound quite as depressing, does it? But of course, every glass that's half full is also half empty. Any advantage for those who have it can be viewed as a disadvatage for those who don't.
So... you quoted me where I said there's a problem when people base their enjoyment on things others do differently, that have no direct effect on them... then you go on to say how you don't enjoy the fact that people do things differently that have no direct effect on you. Congratulations, I guess?
I really believe, that it is everybody's own decision how to play. And if someone prefers to box, then /shrug, why not? I wouldnt blame a class of being capable to solo when you have a class which has more or less difficulties to do so and claim that as a reason to take away their ability to do so. Live with what you've got and get along with it, that is the challenge you have to face.
because it affects other players you might wonder why...my reasoning is that the servers run on a hard cap...they won't be merged or changed as long as you don't go over that cap A Multibox server might have a 1000 player cap....with 300 non-box characters A Single-account server might have a 1000 player cap....with 1000 non-box characters. The grouping opportunity more than trippled on that single-account server for single account owners. Boxers directly and negatively impact non-boxers, because they take up spots that might have been filled with single account users otherwise, which would greatly enhance group match-making.
Are you talking about EQ? What player cap?? Also, on your hypothetical multibox server - who cares about grouping opportunities? Everybody multiboxes on it!
Leaving aside the obvious quantity-vs-quality issues with that sort of thinking, I'd hazard a guess that any plan which includes the steps "Reduce number of subscribers" and "Reduce number of servers" is probably not one SoE is going to actively pursue.
It's not a hypothetical server, it's the current status of EQ servers. All servers are multibox-allowed servers if you will. The result is that single account owners are spread out over multiple servers right now, and match-making for single-account owners is severely impacted by this.
That's kind of a black/white fallacy you have going there. Just because someone boxes doesn't mean they never group. I've grouped with many people who box, in fact it's a common practice to fill in some of the weak points in any given group with a combination of mercs and alts. I'm on the test server, one of the lowest populations in the entire game, and the most frequently seen group requests are boxers who have multiple slots they can fill in any potential group. Eliminating boxing will actually *hurt* grouping because it will restrict the average versatility of any potential grouper. That and the whole 'antisocial boxers are flooding the servers and drowning out real players' myth is simply that, a myth.
servers are NOT FULL. and merging them to double the active players jstu ends up cutting the active players back to where they are. if servers were full peopel coudlnt keep making alts. havign 1000 active toons at once regardless of if hteyre single players or boxes, does not in any way stop more players from also playing. there is plenty and i mean PLENTY of room for growth. to those talkign about multi accoutn holder advantages: DO THE WORK. simple. it doesnt cost you more money if you dont want it to, yo ucan have al lthe lvl 90 toon you want without ever spending a dime, even max aad ones bc yo ucan buy kronos with plat. only expansions cost real money now by necessity and you cant sit back and complain taht someone has an advantage because they put in teh work to hcreate and develop multiple toons and either paid for or worked to farm the plat for , a gold acct to get them the abilities to have more aas and augs etc. if you dont put in the work or arent willing to you cantcomplain about those that do. its not like people that box are paris hilton and everything was handed to them. yo udont justcreate a second gold accoutn and instnatly have a level 100 maxed out raid toon to go with your main's 100 maxed our raid toon. boxes arent jsut soemthing you pay another 15 a month for and do nothing to develop like mercs, they are more work. you cant say that a single account holder does more work than a multi one, jsut that the work per toon is higher. a 2 account holder may have lower work per toon (in some isntances but definitely not all) when working on something, but the total work is still greater. this is one of hte reasons that some people dont box, not because they cant afford to but bc they dont want ot put forth the extra work to. what yo udo with yoru boxes once yo uahve them is up to you and it varies tremendously, but to sit there and have this self-righteous idealistic idea that you are better than soemone else simply because you chose to do less work and are incapable of making friends or unwilling to join a guild and socialize but simply want the game to hand yo ueverything...sorry im not buyin it. anyone that chooses to be guildless, fellowshipless, and firendless, and then complains about not having groups isn't worth worrying about because they jsut want ot put forth the least effort (as in socializing or developing more toons ) complain the most and play the victim card(calling socializing "jumping through hoops") all the while wanting to colelct all the same rewards of the people that do put forth the effort. no one has to box to do well in the game. thats been proven time and time again, but they DO haveto do more than stick up a /lfg tag.
Exactly right. With a Merc a whole lot of play opportunities opened up to me that wouldn't have otherwise. I can now handle it takes 1/3rd of a group to beat it content. With only 1 boxed toon a boxer can handle 2/3rds of a group content - a raider with a raid equipped alt maybe 1/2 of all current group content. See, SOE can reduce single account disadvantage. But if they totally eliminated it boxing and the revenue it generates would largely disappear. Can't have that can we? I would also agree with the half empty/half full metaphor except our goal is to stay current. Not staying current isn't just half-empty, it's totally empty. So it's really totally empty vs. totally full with maybe some progress on bonus rewards not all players are going to see. When single account ownership results in not staying current that's disadvantage, not IMO normal where boxers simply exceed normal. Still none of this matters - other than Mercs and making some achievements non-linear so pickup groups have an easier time finding things to do everyone can benefit from SOE isn't going to address the disparity. The disparity brings in $$$. Besides with a fair number of players taking care of themselves and their boxed alts almost exclusively and a falling population we've been teetering close to box or it's not worth playing EQ for a few years now. If it's box or quit, boxing starts looking pretty gud.
you jsut completely backtracked on yourself BB. youve said yourself you CAN be current jsut as well as a single player and youv'e proven it, but then here you say that single accoutn owners are "completely empty" because they can't ever be current. thats total BS
Ok, but you said multi-boxing affects single-boxers because boxes fill some kinda limit. What limit? Have you seen a 'full' EQ server somewhere? And, do I understand it correctly, that you want to set up a 'single account reservation', a server where there is no boxing at all? Good luck with that utopian paradise idea #12524333.
I don't like the whole approach based on a 'disadvantage'. The game is well playable with a single account. Moreover, it is designed for playing with a single account. There is an advantage for using multiple accounts, but no disadvatage for using only 1 account, because single account is the norm. When multi-boxing becomes the norm (and no, it's not, not even close; the OP is full of... exaggeration) then we can talk about 'single account disadvantage'.
It doesn't matter if the server is full or not. You could have a 2000 cap server filled at 50%, which would be 1000 players. STILL, on a server where multiboxing is high, single account owners become a minority, which severely impact their grouping opportunities.
That might be a solution, one they likely won't implement, but a server for single account owners would likely be popular. If you bring single account owners together, it would increase match-making. It's striking how popular classic servers are in the beginning, and how much people group on them, it's after a while the grouping ends, when boxing and cliques take over.
Sorry Oranges, but if you truly believe that people who don't like to group don't play games like EQ you would be horribly, horribly wrong.
In case you haven't realized Oranges is given information none of us have. Oranges knows how populated each server is, how many boxers populate each server, who is/isn't a single account holder and various other bits of information. Oranges uses this in an attempt to help us, the unknowing fools we are, to make everquest better. In the future, expansions will center around Oranges, gear will adorn the name Oranges and the races across Norrath will bow to the one true, enlightened being, Oranges. I welcome our future Norrathian God with open arms and a chorus of songs singing praises in their name.
